I think your program rocks and until they actually produce a computer version I'm disappointed at Donald's response. That having been said it's Jay at Rio Grande Games that I hope steps in. He owns the rights. I like RGG and have spent a ton of money on their products so unless his PC game is available shortly I sure wish he'd respond and give you the ok.

I read through the thread on BGG, and am a little disappointed by the manner in which Donald responded. He's certainly within his right to protect his intellectual property, but some of the comments were completely unnecessary. Kudos to you for keeping your cool throughout the exchange.

That said, I know there are "homemade" PC versions of other games distributed by RGG available, and many of them use the same art as the published board games. St. Petersburg and Ra come to mind immediately, and both of those are available directly (or at least linked) from BGG.

My guess is that the version they have in development has something to do with the attitude towards your effort. Neither St. Pete or Ra have commercial versions in the works (that I'm aware of anyway) and that could be the difference.

After reading that I think it was unwise to post it at their forum, as this is the same as posting an MtG application at wizards forums. They will always complain as they hold the rights to images and sometimes rules etc.

Donald X. wrote:We have our own program coming and I have to support that one. It's probably better than yours anyway; I hear it has the real art and everything.

This made me laugh as they only can say it's better because it's better!

The main problem here is that you're cutting in their profit as people can play the game without buying either box version or the "coming soon" pc version. You're also violating RGG copyright as most likely the Dominion inventors sold all their right to the publishing company (very common as this lowers the amount of money you have to pay the publisher to get your game out to people)

Also the thread at BGG was hijacked by +1 post people posting meaningless spam.

I just got the real card game for my birthday last week and am learning to play it as we speak.

I too have 2 other home made versions of RG games that have been freely available on the net for years, those being San Juan & Puerto Rico. This is not anything new.

I for one will continue to use the "Full" graphical version that jatill has made and the developers can bite me if they don't like it! I saw earlier a post that said that the creator was all in favor of what jatill was doing. Not sure if he still has the rights to his game as was discussed by Snacko, so things could have changed from his standpoint.

Either way, I will buy RGG's version when it is released. In the meantime, I am very grateful to jatill for giving me this app that will allow me to play the game as I continue to learn while playing the real thing with my wife.

All this shows is that there are still people who will pay for a game, music, etc... even if there are free alternatives out there. This happened with music and iTunes and as has been the case with MTG for years now. Yes, I play MTG using MWS, but I have continued to buy a crap load of real MTG product all through that time. If anything, I bought even more because I got to play with the cards via MWS. IMHO, all these free apps do is heighten the awareness of the products and acts, for the most part, as a great advertisement for the real thing. My willingness to pay for real MTG products and music over the years puts my money where my mouth is!

I intend to do this again when Dominion is released by RGG as a PC game. Until then, I will play jatill's app while I continue to purchase more real product from RGG in the form of the Dominion expansions that are currently available.

'Twas in the bogs of Cannelbrae My mate did meet an early grave 'Twas nothing left for us to save In the peat-filled bogs of Cannelbrae.

ivadla wrote:What do you think about making the game Open Source? You could publish the source code on a site like http://sourceforge.net/I would like to contribute to the game by fixing bugs and improving the AI.

I've been thinking about it and I probably will. The only annoying part is that it's written in VB6, which is not a free-to-use language. If I were to start this over, I would have used flash.

jatill wrote:I've been thinking about it and I probably will. The only annoying part is that it's written in VB6, which is not a free-to-use language. If I were to start this over, I would have used flash.

Are there any good free tools to create flash applications?Maybe your application could be ported to VB.NET. That way, Mono could be used for the development.

Snacko wrote:I would second that VB makes those linux/mac guys a bit sad, but I suppose such simple (as in no dx or other heavily windows centric libraries) software should run under wine.

It does run in wine. But there seems to be a memory leak which makes the program and the x-server consume a lot of memory. This could be wine's fault though.

Snacko wrote:Other than flash I would say java is a good choice as it can also be embedded into a website.

I second that. I started a java version, before I heard about this one. But it can only simulate games so far and has no gui.